CD REVIEW: Protest The Hero “Fortress”

A friend once described Protest The Hero to me as being “this amazingly badass Canadian prog-metal band you have to check out.”

Well, the latest record from these fast-rising prog-metal headbangers takes a slight detour from what’s being offered by other progressive metal bands nowadays. Really the group takes a more technical route with “Fortress,” bringing their sound closer to the mathcore genre instead of prog-metal, but I can see the proggy connection here.

Protest The Hero shows the ability and desire to create pop-prog a la Coheed and Cambria and also occasionally unleashes its inner jam monster a la Mars Volta on most all of “Fortress'” 10 tracks. What PTH doesn’t do is pack the record with songs that are longer than the Constitution a la Rush and feature the whiny, high-pitched shrieks of a singer who sounds like he has his gonads caught in a vice like the three aforementioned groups.

Yes, I know there are more prog rock bands out there other than Rush, Coheed and TMV, but you’ve gotta admit Geddy, Claudio and Cederic all have pretty annoying voices.

Simply put, if you’re a metal fan you have to buy “Fortress.” From the intense opener “Bloodmeat,” all the way to the brutal one-two combo of “Goddess Bound” and “Goddess Gagged” – the record’s closing tracks – this album will give your ears a good browbeating and release your gonads from that prog-rock vice they’ve been stuck in for who knows how long.